Wednesday, May 17, 2017

‘If We Called Ourselves Siberians, Moscow Would Tear Us Apart,’ Krasnodar Official Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 17 – Moscow residents
are quite free to call themselves Muscovites, Rashit Rafikov, an aide to the
governor of Krasnoyarsk kray; but “if we were to try to call ourselves ‘Siberians,’
they would certainly tear us into little pieces,” a reflection of the
terminological confusion surrounding nationality issues in Russia today.

Rafikov’s comments came at a meeting
in Kazan yesterday at which was discussed the latest draft of the new law on
state nationality policy that is supposed to be ready for adoption by August 1
and showed that there is more than a little fear about and opposition to the
measure as drawn up so far (nazaccent.ru/content/24067-v-kazani-predstavili-proekt-zakona-ob.html).

The
Krasnoyarsk official spoke for many when he said that “the biggest problem for
work on a strategy of state nationality policy in the regions is the lack of an
agreed upon terminology for nationality issues. ‘Titular’ nation, ‘aboriginal’
population, and ‘Russian majority’ are understood by each person in his own
way.

As
a result, Rafikov said, “we are forced to conduct unending arguments with lawyers
and up until now we have not been hurrying to adopt a strategy for the
realization of state nationality policy in Krasnoayrsk kray.”

As
reported by Nazaccent.ru, the latest draft helps to explain why many
non-Russians are concerned.“According
to the draft of the conception of the draft law, the goal of state nationality
policy of the Russian Federation is the preservation of Russian society as a
civic nation in all the multiplicity of its cultures and languages and the
creation of conditions for the further development of all nationalities and
ethnic communities of the country.”

More
seriously, the new draft explicitly criticizes what it describes as the past
ractice of treating nations and peoples strictly in “an ethnic sense,”
something that it suggests inevitably generates a crisis in countries “with a
complex ethno-confessional composition of the population” and can lead to their
demise as in the case of the USSR.

“Contemporary
nations,” the draft says, “are to be understood as sovereign civil societies
under a common state power,” something most non-Russians and many ethnic Russians
will see as a diminution of their standing as nations, despite the drafts
statement that state policy will seek to protect “the ethnocultural and
linguistic variety” of the Russian population.

The
draft law goes on to define the civic Russian nation (rossiiskaya natsiya) as “the community of citizens of the Russian
Federation of various ethnic, religious, social and other memberships who
recognize their historical and civic community and political-legal ties with
the Russian state and with Russian [rossiiskaya]
culture.”

That
formulation too is certain to be attacked by ethnic Russians who believe they
are representatives of a uniquely Russian [russkaya]
culture and by non-Russians who believe that this term, like the Soviet people
of USSR times, represents a direct attack on their uniqueness of nations as
well.